The Ordinary Seaman (8 page)

Some of los blacks seemed to come to the pier every night, and others came now and then or maybe even just once; they never came when it rained. The crew didn’t recognize anyone from the night they’d been attacked while crossing los proyectos—the one Esteban watched for was fat and wore a small gold loop in each earlobe. But now that they’d been discovered, los blacks grew more and more interested in the crew, actually seeming to absorb the crew’s silent, furtive presence up there on a darkened ship into what they came to the pier to do at night. Almost nightly at least someone took a turn shouting taunts up at them, usually incomprehensibly, though sometimes they understood,
“You fucked you fucked you po mothuhfucksfucked …,”
on and on like a chant. Then at least El Barbie shouting back that they could go fuck their putamadres and suck on their putamadres’ farts, always something elegant like that. Los blacks seemed to know something about the
Urus;
it was as if they’d somehow figured out what the crew’s situation was.
They spray-painted
DEATH SHIP
on the grain elevator, and skulls over crossed bones, and another night someone even wrote,
CAGUERO DE LA MUERTE
, which seemed to mean “Shitter of Death,” though they probably meant “Cargo Ship of Death,” leaving out the
r
in
carguero,
but, the grain elevator being the crew’s latrine, maybe they did mean that. They scribbled with spray paint all over the generator and compressors’ shields.

Esteban and the others talked it over at length one night. “This thing that is happening to us here,” said Esteban, trying to imitate the slow, somber, reasoning-out-loud tone of his political officer in the BLI, “seems funny to them. But it also seems to make them angry. Why? Bueno…,” and his index finger froze pensively over his lips—chocho, there was an impressive word his political officer might have used to explain this situation, what was it?

“Because what is happening to us here, vos Piri”—El Barbie sneered—“is very funny, but it also makes them sick to live on the same planet with a bunch of helpless losers who don’t know how to fight back. The stone fits the frog, no?”

The cook growled, “That is unjust.” And El Faro, squinting around at everybody without his eyeglasses and excitedly nodding, exclaimed, “Sí pues! Fight back!” While Bernardo glared at El Barbie the way he always does whenever anyone taunts Esteban with the name Piri.

But Esteban was sitting on deck with his index finger still curled against his upper lip, because he’d suddenly remembered the words
lumpen proletariat,
and they had made him feel even more apathetic and pointlessly far away from himself.

“All this fucking broken glass everywhere! It just doesn’t go with me, to do nothing back,” said El Barbie. “Omar Usareli doesn’t take shit from anybody!” El Barbie’s name is Omar Usareli.

“That’s why you live with your tongue up el Capitán’s culo, eh?” said Bernardo. “Who are you to talk about fighting back?”

El Barbie stared threateningly at Bernardo, and Tomaso Tostado put up his hands and said, “Ya! Stop talking babosadas! Hijo de la gran puta, we’re all in this together!”

And sweet-natured Cebo suggested lowering the ladder and inviting los blacks up for a talk, and everyone gaped at him.

“Why not, why not try and talk to them?” said El Faro.

“Hombre, are you crazy?” said Roque Balboa. “Remember what happened en los proyectos? You’ve already forgotten how you lost your glasses?”

“Qué mariconada,” said El Tinieblas, picking up a length of rusted chain. “Look at all the shit we have up here to hit them with. And that night, we didn’t have anything.”

“And if one of them has a gun?” said Pínpoyo. “Remember that scene in Indiana Yones, the guy with the big sword is ready to cut off his head and Indiana Yones pulls out a gun and shoots him!”

“It’s true, vos,” said Caratumba, the terse Guatemalteco. “Some of them will probably have guns.”

“Why don’t we just send El Buzo down to talk to them?” said El Barbie. “He’s a mandingo.”

El Buzo, leaning on the rail with his curly goat’s beard and chin resting in his hand, looked at El Barbie with a deadpan gaze for a moment, then said, “Brother, yo no me meto con nadie.” That’s one of El Buzo’s favorite refrains: even when playing a double domino he always says that he doesn’t get in anyone’s way.

“They’re just cruel delinquents,” said Bernardo.

“Vos, son lumpen!” Esteban suddenly exclaimed, and everyone looked at him curiously, waiting for him to say something more.

“Lumpen jodido,” he added. “Fucked lumpen, just like us.”

“Y qué?” said Roque Balboa.

“Y qué,” said Esteban. “I know.”

“What’s lumpen?” asked Canario.

“Pobre Esteban.” Panzón chuckled, giving him a soft clap on the shoulder. “Still a communist.”

One night El Barbie, obsessed with the idea of turning a bottle into a Molotov cocktail and pitching it back, stood on deck for hours with his eyes trained on the sky, hoping to catch one before it landed. He didn’t even come close, since there was no way of telling when or where
the next bottle was coming, but he almost broke his face tripping over a chock. Esteban hoped Barbie would run right into one of the holes on deck and disappear.

At first, in the mornings, Capitán Elias interrogated the crew about los blacks. What do they do, what do they want, what do they say? He seemed desperate for more information, but they had little to add to what they’d already told. Capitán Elias obviously didn’t like it that los blacks were coming to the pier at night, but Esteban noticed he didn’t seem to know what to do about it. He noticed, for example, that Capitán Elias didn’t mention calling the police or even port security. Then el Capitán stopped asking about los blacks altogether, though he still went out to the end of the pier every morning as soon as he arrived, kicking the glass vials into the water whenever he found some there; and whenever he found even a shard of glass on deck, he scolded the crew for not having swept up.

Los blacks all came, they imagined, from los proyectos, that labyrinth of brown brick buildings that begins opposite the port yard walls and the trees and the block of mainly warehouse-lined streets parallel to the waterfront. Few streets cross los proyectos, though there are sidewalks and a grass mall and trees and park benches, and at night the brick buildings with their lights on seem to run on in serene, shadowy repetition forever. They’d only been “delayed in port for repairs” a little more than a week the night they’d decided to disregard el Capitán’s warnings. They wanted to see Brooklyn, they wanted to go for a walk, post some letters, buy some beers. José Mateo, the cook, had been in Brooklyn, years ago, must have been somewhere around here, he remembered a bar whose Puerto Rican owner would drive him and his crewmates back to their ship after the bar closed so they wouldn’t have to walk back; it was dangerous back then too. But who was going to attack fifteen marineros? They were more worried about running into Immigration Police, ending up in one of those underground cells el Capitán had told them about, put to work cracking walnuts open with their teeth.

It was another humid, moon-smothering night. They stood around the spigot at the foot of the pier and a rusted barrel filled with water scummed by soap, grime, insects, their decrepit oasis, stripped down to wash, though Esteban felt that all soap did was grease the layers of stickiness all over himself enough to swirl them around a little. They jogged naked back up the ladder, clothing bundled in their hands. In their cabins, many dressed in their best. Pínpoyo’s cologne was called Siete Machos, and he splashed some into Esteban’s hands, stinging his blisters. Pínpoyo is handsome like a puppy-eyed pop star, like Chayanne, looks much younger than his nineteen years, carries himself like a baby-faced galán, that’s why the crew calls him Pínpoyo. The pressed white trousers and the shirt that looked like fireworks against black sky were still in dry-cleaning plastic when he unfolded them from his suitcase. His immaculate white leather cowboy boots had been kissed by lipstick-smeared lips over both narrowing tips. The woman and Pínpoyo had been in bed, both naked except for him in his boots, when she reapplied her lipstick and kissed his boots right there with her juicy chunche right in his face like this, that’s what he told Esteban in his cabin, smiling, hands out by both sides of his face grasping invisible nalgas, eyes bright with the memory and now the telling. Esteban stared at the kisses on the boots and exclaimed, “No jodas!” Pínpoyo said he’d only worn the boots that once; his idea was to have them completely covered with kisses by the time their tour was up, collected one woman at a time, port by port, wouldn’t that be putamadre? “No jodas!”—he’d heard and seen a lot of crazy things in his life! But for some reason this reminded Esteban of Rigoberto Mazariego, who brought his novia’s childhood doll to war with him, a naked plastic doll with blue glass eyes and a wild tangle of reddish hair, took it everywhere, on patrol, into combat, charging up jungly slopes cradling the doll against his ribs with one hand and his AK out in his other, flopping down under fire, charging back up, calmly setting the doll down beside him when he needed both hands to aim and fire, he and the doll did great, neither ever wounded, not even during the ambush on the Zompopera Road, slept with it, ate with it, bathed it. But was Pínpoyo’s thing with his boots like that? Or was it
more like Otílio de la Rosa’s fish and hummingbird tattoo, which was now an embarrassment to him?

Too bad for Canario; he picked the double-six domino, he couldn’t go into Brooklyn, someone had to stay behind and stand watch …

They decided to cut across los proyectos rather than risk dark, empty streets with faraway figures waiting on unlit corners to drag foreign seafarers down alleyways at the point of an Uzi, verdad? Looking back on it, the lack of people outside in los proyectos on such a hot night should have seemed ominous. A whole noisy barrio happening indoors: the night air like a sizzling frying pan full of all kinds of music mixed together, merengue, salsa, rap, reggae; voices pouring from windows, a woman tiredly braying, “Pepinoooo Pepinooo” in a low foghorn voice that sounded Cuban to Esteban, television, telephones ringing, the rattling whir of electric fans, air conditioners rumbling. And down below, nobody out, all stillness and shadows. They’d walked quietly, crossing the tree-bowered lawns, through the shadowy caves between brick buildings, young men lounging in open, graffitied stairwells turning to look at them, someone shouted something from a window. And as if that unintelligible shout from a window in the dark gap between two buildings had somehow warned them, they’d quickened their pace, and then it was like walking into lightning, the sudden, brief stampede of footsteps behind and then blurred lead pipes cracking against skin and bones; within seconds the crew sprawled as if napping, hearts pounding into the cool dirt and grass. Morenos and a few Latino-looking trigueños with moreno hair, one of them clasping a tiny pistol at the end of outstretched arms:
Stay down, don’t move, shut up,
that’s probably what they were saying. Roque Balboa said, “No dispara!” and the one standing closest kicked him in the head. But Roque’s saying don’t shoot like that suddenly made Esteban think of Guardia forcing people to lie facedown before shooting them in the back of the head and his fingers dug into the earth and he watched their feet, almost all of them wearing those big sneakers like Mark’s. Then one of their attackers spoke in Spanish, warning, “Tranquilo, tranquilo, muchachos, y no les va a pasar nada.” They were in a hurry, moving now as if they’d just snuck into a farm
patch to gather vegetables growing from prostrate bodies, stepping among them in their silent, big sneakers, yanking wallets and money from pockets, bending to undo watches… Esteban saw Bernardo pushing himself up, trying to kneel, out of it, his forehead pouring blood—one of them whacked his piece of pipe against Bernardo’s shoulders and Esteban sprang towards the viejo and instantly felt himself grabbed up and his arms pinned to his back while a muchachón with earrings in each ear and a piratical kerchief and his big, flabby upper torso bared stepped forward and punched him five, six times in the belly in the face splitting his lip filling his head with acid-tasting fumes. Esteban was let go of and slumped backwards onto the grass. Now there was laughter all around. Then someone else was standing over him, wide eyed, his mouth a small, silent
o,
slowly waving a long blade over his face … mierda,
his
knife, Soviet Army issue, he’d been allowed to keep it after the BLI. They ran off into the night with his knife and everyone’s money and watches, including the cook’s gold one and his gold bracelets, even necklaces and crucifixes yanked from necks, one with Pínpoyo’s once-kissed white boots tucked under each arm. And the four folded five-dollar bills, one from each of Esteban’s tíos, that he’d had in his pocket. He’d left his watch back in his cabin, but, chocho, he felt like crying about the knife. The crew lay there as if a grenade had gone off among them and they were only now beginning to stir from the sleep of the dead. Where’s my arm? Has anyone seen my head? It seemed to Esteban that he didn’t recognize anybody, had no idea who they all were. All those personalities that had already been tagged with nicknames seemed to have fled into the night too, leaving moaning, whimpering bodies behind on the ground, bodies beginning to stir now and grope for scattered wallets and letters to mail: Look, this is me, on this ID card, that’s my photo, and this letter’s addressed to my novia, can’t forget her name. There was Bernardo, his eyes closed and flickering in a mask of blood, barely conscious. Esteban tried to lift him up by the shoulders, but his own legs felt so weak and wobbly he fell down sitting with the old man sprawled over his lap. Hijueputa, in all the war I only got hurt this badly once. And never lost my knife. He sat there looking around, his lips and
nose looking like one big, bloody hole in his face, wanting to tell everybody that they had to get up and go, that the blood was nothing, especially when it was your own, that it was wonderful to be able to taste it, feel it filling your own mouth, you fat black pato hijueputa with your earrings and flabby tits …